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Mallick: I'll focus on Whitney Houston at Wembley, not Bobby Brown years

Whitney Houston performs at the Nelson Mandela Freedom Festival, a tribute concert for Mandela's 70th birthday, at Wembley Stadium in London on June 11, 1988, when she was one of pop music's bright lights. (Ebet Roberts / Redferns)

She looked so young and happy, so utterly at home. Her best moment was singing “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” as the London sky began turning to dusk and clouds above Wembley scudded across the blue. Houston looked up into an English sky and sang with perfect simplicity, “If somebody loves you, won't they always love you?”

Well, no, but she sang it as if she didn't know that.

Or you can remember her as she was in the last half of her life, someone who paid a terrible price for being a woman who won the poisonous gift of fame. Several commentators, including the Star's Richard Ouzounian, have written fine, intelligent, not-unloving pieces on what they observed after Houston married Bobby Brown, the man who would drag her down into a druggie gutter.

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On the Internet, unthinking grieving fans have turned on these recollections, which are printed plain and clear, not smooshed with lipstick, not gummed up with the slavish worship of celebrity.

Fame is harder for women than for men. Bobby Brown married a bright beautiful star whose voice seemed effortless. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Rihanna, on and endlessly on, are all musicians who were with mean men and were beaten, or humiliated, or resented for their money and success. Absurd as it sounds, men resent a wife with money, fame and power. So they gaslight her.

Women are supposed to be secondary, like whatever beautiful powerless cocktail waitress or model is currently on the arm of George Clooney. Primary women will be made to pay.

Bobby Brown hit Houston, introduced her to hard drugs, made her star in his reality show where he referred to helping her defecate, showed her bloated body and the rashes popping out on her face.

Buzzing on drugs, Houston was arrogant and callous. Drugs don't soften you, they make you jagged. You snap at your daughter, you command an entourage and you scare them so much that they won't check on you after an hour in the bathroom alone. You don't know the drugs are turning you into a jerk. That's the great charm of drugs.

Houston sang about suffering, and then she lived it. Come on, “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” hurts like a sucking chest wound.

Music critic Tom Reynolds has noted the misery level of most of Houston's hits.

He quotes her character, Rachel Marron, in The Bodyguard on the subject of her own song “I Will Always Love You.”

“I mean, it's so depressing. Have you listened to the words?”

Reynolds hated the video for “I Will Always Love You.” There Houston sits in a chair in a dark suit, feet apart, hands clasped. “She looks like a high school basketball coach studying a new point guard,” Reynolds said tiredly.

That's not how he — and we — want to remember Houston. Reynolds wrote: “I want to see my Whitney standing before a mic stand wearing a willowy dress, beaming and angelic, i.e., pre-Bobby Brown. She shouldn't look like she's waiting for a job interview.”

We want her radiance. But we get the ugly vision, too.

I am haunted by the sight of Houston, sunglassed and drugged up in an interview as Brown explains that she enjoys hitting and being hit. She is poking her head forward, then sideways, then suddenly jerking it back.

She looks as though she's twitching from antipsychotic drugs. She looks like a demented bird.

So I go back and watch the footage from Wembley. She looks up into the clouds, she and a billion people worldwide under the same sky and all happy at that moment.

Both visions are true, and we have the right to remember and describe both.

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